Chapter 3

Alessandro PorteIIi
W H A T MAI<ES O R A L HISTORY DIFFERENT

This article, first published in 1979, challenged oral historys critics head-on by arguing that what makes oral history different - orality, narrative form, subject ivity, the different credibility of memory, and the relationship between interviewer and interviewee - should be considered as strengths rather than as weaknesses, a resource rather than a problem. Alessandro Portelli holds a Chair in American Literature a t the University of Rome. Reprinted by permission from The Death o f Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History by Alessandro Portelli, the State University o f New York Press 0 1 9 9 1 State University of New York. All rights reserved. A first version, Sulla specificita della storia orale, appeared in P r i m Maggio (Milano, Italy), 1979, vol. 13, pp. 54-60, reprinted as On the peculiarities of oral history in History Workshop Journal, 1981, no. 12, pp. 96-107.

Yes, said Mrs. Oliver, and then when they come to talk about i t a long time afterwards, thcyvc got the solution for it which theyve made up themselves. That isnt awfully helpful, is it? It is helpful, said Poirot . . . Its important to know certain facts w h c h have lingered in peoples memories although they may not h o w exactly what the fact was, why it happened or what led to it. But they might easily h o w somethmg that we do not h o w and that we have no means of learning. So there have been memories leading to theories. Agatha Christie, Elephants Con Remember
His historical researches, however, did not lie so much among books as among men; for the former are lamentably scanty on his favorite topics; whereas he found the old burghers, and still more their wives, rich in that legendary lore, so invaluable to true history. Whenever, there fore, he happened upon a genuine Dutch family, snugly shut up in its

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low-roofed farmhouse, under a spreading sycamore, he looked upon it as a littlc clasped volume of black-letter and studied it with the zeal of a book-worm. Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle

Memories leading to theories

S P E C T E R I S H A U N T I N G T H E H A L L S of the academy: the specter of oral history. The Italian intellectual community, always suspicious of news from outside and yet so subserjicnt to foreign discoveries hastened to cut oral hstory down to size before even trying to understand what it is and how to use it. The method used has been that of charging oral history with pretensions it does not have, in ordcr to set everybodys mind at ease by refuting them. For instance, La Repubblica, the most intellectually and internationally oriented of Italian dailies rushed to dismiss descriptions from below and thc artificial packages of oral history where things arc supposed to move and talk by themselves, with out evcn stopping to notice that it is not r h i n p , but people (albeit people often considered no more than dungs) that oral hlstory expects to move and talk by themselves. There seems to be a fear that once the floodgates of orality are opened, writing (and rationality along with it) will be swept out as if by a spontancous uncontrol lable mass of fluid, amorphous material. But this attitude blinds us to the fact that our awe of writing has distorted our perception of language and communication to the point where we no longer understand either orality or the nature of writing itself. As a mattcr of fact, written and oral sources are not mutually exclusive. They have common as well as autonomous characteristics, and specific functions which only either one can till (or w h c h one set of sources fills better than the other). Therefore, they require diffcrcnt spccific interpretative instruments. But the under valuing and the overvaluing of oral sources end up by cancelling out specific qualities, turning these sources either into mere supports for traditional written sources, or into an illusory cure for all ills. This chapter will attempt to suggest some of the ways in which oral history is intrinsically different, and therefore specifically useful.
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The orality of oral sources

Oral sources are orul sources. Scholars are willing to admit that the actual document is the recorded tape; but almost all go on to w-ork on thc transcripts, and it is only transcripts that are published.*Occasionally, tapes arc actually dcstroycd: a symbolic case of the destruction of the spoken word. The transcript turns aural ohjects into bisual ones, which incvitably implies changes and interpretation. Ihe different efficacy of recordings, as compared t o transcripts - for classroom purposes, for instance - can only be appreciated by dircct cxperience. This is one reason why I believe it is unnecessary to p e excessive attention to the quest for new and closer methods of transcription. Expecting the tran script to replace the tape for scientific purposes is equivalent to doing art criticism

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on reproductions, or literary criticism on translations. The most literal translation is hardly ever the best, and a truly faithful translation always implies a certain amount of invention. The same may be true for transcription of oral sources. The disregard otthe orality of oral sources has a direct bearing on interpretative theory. The first aspect which is usually stressed is origin: oral sourccs give us information about illiterate people or social groups whose written history is either missing or distorted. Another aspect concerns content: the daily life and material culturc of these people and groups. However, these are not specific to oral sources. Emigrants letters, for instance, have the same origin and content, but are written. On the other hand, many oral history projects have collected interviews with niembcrs of social groups who use writing, and have been conccrned w-ith topics usually covered by the standard writtcn archival material. Therefore, origin and content are not sufficient to distinguish oral sources from the range of sources used by social history in general; thus, many theories of oral history arc, in fact, theories of social history as a whole. In the search for a distinguishing factor, we must therefore turn in the first place to form. We hardly need repeat here that writing represents language almost exclu sively by means of segmentary traits (graphemes, syllables, words, and sentences). But language is also composed of another set of traits, w h c h cannot be containcd within a single segment but which are also bearers of mcaning. The tone and volume range and the rhythm of popular specch carry implicit meaning and social connota tions whch are not rcproducible in writing - unless, and then in inadequate and hardly accessible form, as musical notation. The same statemcnt may have quite contradictory meanings, according t o the speakers intonation, which cannot be represented objectivcly in the transaipt, but only approximately described in the transcribers own words. In order to make the transcript readable, it is usually necessary to insert punctuation marks, which are always the more-or-less arbitrary addition of the transcriber. Punctuation inmcates pauses distributed according to grammatical rules: each mark has a conventional place, meaning, and length. These hardly ever coincide with the rhythms and pauses of the spealong subject, and therefor end up by confining speech within grammatical and logical rules which it does not neces sarily follow. The exact length and position of the pause has an important function in the understanding of the meaning of speech. Regular grammatical pauses tend to organize w-hat is said around a basically expository and referential pattcm, whereast pauses of irregular length and position accentuate the emotional content, and very heavy rhythmic pauses recall the style of epic narratives. Many narrators switch from one type of rhythm to anothcr within the same interview, as their attitude tow-ard the subjects under discussion changes. Of course, h s can only be perceived by listening, not by rcading. A similar point can be made concerning the velocity of speech and i t s changes during the interview. There are no fixed interpretative rules: slowing down may mean grcater emphasis as well as greater difficulty, and acceleration may show a wish to glide over certain points, as well as a greater familiarity or ease. In all cases, the analysis of changes in velocity must be combined with rhythm analysis. Changes are, however, the norm in speech, while regulariLy is the norm in writing (printing most of all) and the presumed norm of reading: variations are introduced by the reader, not by the text itself.

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This is not a question of philological purity. Traits which cannot he contained within segments are the site (not exclusive, but very important) o f essential narrative functions: they reveal the narrators emotions, their participation in the story, and thc way thc story affected them. This uften involves attitudes which speakers may not be able (or willing) to express otherwise, or elements which are not fully within their control. By abolishing these traits, we flatten the emotional content of speech down to the supposed equanimity- and objectibity of the written document. This is even more true when folk informants are involved: they may be poor in vocabu lary but are often richer in range oftone, volume and intonation than middle-class speakers who have learned to imitate in speech the monotone of writing.

Oral history as narrative

Oral hstorical sources are mi-rative sources. Therefore the analysis of oral history niaterials must avail itself of some of the general categories dcvcloped by narrative theory in literature and folklore. Ths is as true of testimony given in free interviews as of the more formally organized materials of folklore. For example, some narratives contain substantial shifts in the velocity of narration, that is, in the ratio between the duration of the events described and the duration of the narration. An d o r m a n t may recount in a few words experiences which lasted a long time, or dwcll at length on brief episodcs. These oscillations are significant, although we cannot establish a general norm of interpretation: dwelling on an episode may be a way of stressing its importance, but also a strategy to distract attentions honi other more delicate points. In all cases, there is a relationshp between the velocity of the narrative and the meaning of the narrator. The same can bc said of other categories among those elaborated by Gdrard Genettc, such as distance or perspcctive,w h c h define the position of the narrator toward the story.6 Oral sources from nonhegemonic classes arc linked to the tradition of the folk narrative. In this tradition distinctions between narrative genres are pcrceived differ ently than in the written tradition of the educated classes. This is true of the generic distinction between factual and artistic narratives, between events and feeling or imagination. While the perception of an account as true is rclevant as much to legend as to personal experience and historical memory, there are no formal oral genres specifically destined to transmit historical information; hstorical, poetical, and legendary narratives often becomc inextricably mixed up. The rcsult is narra tives in w-hich the boundary between what takes place outside the narrator and what happens inside, between what concerns thc individual and what concerns thc group, may becomc more elusive than in established written genres, so that personal truth may coincide with shared imagination. Each of these factors can hc rcvealed by formal and stylistic factors. The greater or lesser presence of formalized materials (proverbs, songs, formulas, and stereo types) may measure the degree in which a collcctive viewpoint exists within an indi\iduals narrative. These shifts between standard language and dialect are often a sign of the h n d of the control which speakers have over the narrahve. A typical recurring structure is that in which standard language is used overall, whde dialect crops up in digressions or single anecdotes, coinciding with a morc

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personal involvement of the narrator or (as when the occurrences of dialect coincide with formalized language) the intrusion of collective memory. On the other hand, standard language may emei-ge in a dialcct narrative when it deals with themes more closely connected with the public sphere, such as politics. Again, h s may mean both a more or less conscious degree of estrangement, or a process of conquest of a more educated form of expression begnning with participation in politics.8 Convcrsely-, the dialectization of t e c h c a l terms may bc a sign of the vitality of traditional speech and of the way in which speakers endeavor to broaden the expressive range of their culture.

Events and meaning

The first thing that makes oral hstory diffcrcnt, therefore, is that it tells us less about events than about their meaning. This does not imply that oral hstory has no factual validity. Interviews often reveal unknown events or unknown aspects of known events; they always cast new light on unexplored areas of the daily life of the nonhegemonic classes. From this point of tlew, the only problem posed by oral sources is that of verification (to wluch I will return in the next section). But the unique and precious element w h c h oral sources forcc upon the historian and which no other sources possess in equal measure is the speakers subjectivity. If the approach to research is broad and articulated enough, a cross section of the subjectiv-ityof a group or class may emerge. Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did. Oral sources may not add much to what we know, for instance, of the material cost of a strike to the workers involved, but they tell us a good deal about its psychological costs. Borrow-ing a literary category from the Russian formalists, we might say that oral sources, especially from nonhcgcmonic groups, are a very uscful integration of other sources as far as theJahula - the logical, causal sequence of the story goes; but they become unique and necessary because of their plot - the way in which thc story materials are arranged by narrators in order to tell the story.9 The organization of the narrative reveals a great deal of the speakers relationships to their hstory. Subjectivity is as much the business of history as are the more visible facts. What informants believe is indeed a historicalfact (that is, the fact that they believe + it), as much as what really happened. When workers in Terni misplace a crucial event of their hstory (the lolling of Luigi Trastulli) from one date and context to anotlicr, this does not cast doubts on thc actual chronology, but it does force us to arrange ow interpretation of an entire phase of the towns history. When an old rank-and-file leader, also in Terni, drrams up a story about how he almost got the Communist Party to reverse its strategy after World War 1 1 , we do not rcvise our reconstructions of political debates within the Left, but learn the cxtent of the actual cost of certain decisions to those rank-and-file activists who had to bury into their subconscious their nceds and desires for revolution. When we discover that similar stories are told in other parts of the country, we rccugnize the half-formed legendary complcx in w h c h the senile ramblings of a disappointed old man reveal much about his partys history that is untold in the lengthy and lucid memoirs of its official leaders.
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Should we believe oral sources?

Oral sources are credible hut with a dfirent credibility. The importance of oral testimony may lie not in its adherence to fact, but rather in its departure from it, as imagination, symbolism, and desire emerge. Therefore, there are no false oral sources. Once we have checked their factual crcdihility with all the established criteria of phlolog~calcriticism and factual verification which are required by all types of sources anyway, the diversity of oral history consists in the fact that wrong statements are still psychologtcally true and that this truth may be equally as important as factually reliable accounts. Of cuurse, this does not mean that we accept the dominant prcjudicc which sees factual credibility as a monopoly of written documents. Very often, written documents are only the uncontrolled transmission of unidentified oral sources (as in the case of the report on Trastullis death, which begins: According to verhal information taken . . .). The passage from these oral ur-sources to the written document is often the result of proccsscs which have no scientific credibility and are frequently heavy with class bias. In trial records (at least in Italy, where no legal value is accorded to the tape recorder or shorthand transcripts), what goes on record is not the words actually spoken hy thc witnesses, but a summary dictated by the judge to the clerk. The distortion inherent in such procedure is beyond assessment, especially when the speakers o r i p a l l y expressed themsclvcs in dialect. Yet, many historians who turn up their noses at oral sources accept these legal transcripts with no questions asked. In a lesser measure (thanks to the frequent use of shorthand) this applies to parliamentary records, minutes of meetings and convcntions, and interviews reported in newspapers: all sources which are legitimately and widely used in standard historical research. A hy-product of this prejudice is the insistence that oral sources are distant from events, and therefore undergo the distortion of faulty memory. Indeed, this problem exists for many written documents, which are usually written some time after the event to which they- refer, and often by nonparticipants. Oral sources might compensate chronological distance with a much closer personal involvement. While written memoirs of politicians or labor leaders are usually credited until proven to be in error, they arc as distant from some aspects of the event which they relate as are many oral hstory interviews, and only hide their dcpcndcnce on time by assuming the immutable form of a text. On the other hand, oral narrators have within their culture ccrtain aids to memory. Many stories are told over and over, or discussecl with members of the community; formalized narrative, even mctcr, may help preserve a textual version of an event. In fact, one should not forget that oral informants may also be litcratc. Tiberio Ducci, a former leader of the farm workers league in Genzano, in h e Roman hills, may be atypical: in addition to remembering his o w n experience, he had also researched the local archives. But many informants read books and newspapers, listen to the radio and TV, hear scrmuns and political speeches, and keep diaries, letters, clippings, and photograph albums. Orality and writing, tor many centuries now, have not existed separately: if many written sources are based on orality, modern orality itself is saturated with writing. But what is really important is that memory is not a passive depository offacts, but an active proccss of meation of meanings. Thus, the specific utility of oral

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sources for the historian lies, not so much in chcir ability to prcserve the past, as in the very changes wrought by memory. These changes reveal the narrators effort to make sense of the past and to give a form to their lives, and set the interview and the narrative in their historical context. Changes which may have subsequently taken place in the narrators personal subjective consciousness or in their socio-economic standing, may affect, if not the actual recounting of prior events, a t least the valuation and the coloring of the story. Several people are reticent, for instance, when it comes to describing illegal forms of struggle, such as sabotage. This does nut mean that the? do not remember them clearly, but that there has been a change in their political opinions, personal circumstances, or in their partys line. Acts considered legitimate and even normal or necessary in the past may be therefore now viewed as unacceptable and literally cast out of the tradition. In these cases, the most precious information may lie in what the informants hide, and in the fact that they do hide it, rather than in what they tell. Often, however, narrators are capable of reconstructing their past attitudes even when they no longer coincide with present ones. This is the case with the Terni factory workers who admit that violent reprisals against the executives responsible for mass layoffs in 1953 may have been counterproductive, but yet reconstruct with great lucidity why they seemed useful and sensible a t the time. In one of the most important oral testimvnics of our time, ..lutobiograpby of itlolcolrn X , the narrator describes vcry vividly how his mind worked before he reached his present awarcness, and then judges his own past self by the standards of his present political and religious consciousness. If the interview is conducted shllfully and its purposes are clear to the narrators, it is not impossible for them to make a distinc tion between present and past sclf, and to objectify the past self as other than the present one. In these cases Malcolni X again is typical - irony is the major narra tive mode: two diffcrent ethical (or politic;al, or religious) and narrative standards interfere and overlap, and their tension shapes the telling of the story. On the other hand, w e may also come across narrators whose consciousness seems to have been arrested at climactic moments of their personal expericnce: certain Resistance fighters, or war veterans; and perhaps certain student militants of the 1960s. Often, these individuals are wholly absorbed by the totality of the hstorical event of which they were part, and their account assumes the cadences and wording of epic. The distinction between an ironic or an epic style implies a distinction between historical perspectives, whch ought to be taken into consideration in our interpretation of the testimony.
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0bjectivity
Oral sources arc not objecrwe. This of course applies to every source, though the holiness of writing often leads us to forget it. But the inherent nonobjectivity of oral sources lies in specific intrinsic characteristics, the most important being that they are urtijiciul, variable, and partial. Alex Haleys introduction to Autobiograpby ofiMalcolrn X describes how Malcolm shifted h s narrative approach not spontaneously, but because the interviewers q u e timing led him away from the exclusively public and official image of himself and

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of the Nation of Islam which he was trying to project. lhis illustratcs the fact that the documents of oral history are always the result of a relationship, of a shared project in which both the interviewer and the interviewee are involved together, if not necessarily in harmony. Written documents are fixed; they exist whether we arc aware of them or not, and do not change once we have found them. Oral testi mony is only a potential resource until the researcher calls it into existence. The condition for the existence of the written source is emission; for oral sources, trans mission: a difference similar to that described by Roman Jakobson and Piotr Bogatyrev between the creativc processes of folklore and those of literature. The content of the written source is indcpcndent of the researchers need and hypotheses; it is a stable text, which we can only interpret. The content of oral sources, on the othcr hand, depends largely on what the interviewer puts into it in terms of questions, dialogue, and personal rclationship. It is the researcher who decides that there will be an interview in the first place. Researchers often introduce specific distortions: informants tell them what they believe they want to be told and thus reveal w,ho they think the researcher is. O n the othcr hand, rigidly structured interviews may exclude elements whose existence or relevance were previously unknown to the interviewer and not contemplated in the question schedule. Such interviews tend to confirm the hstorians previous frame of reference. The first requirement, therefore, is that the researcher accept the informant, and give priority to what she or he wishes to tell, rather than what the researcher wants to hear, saving any unanswered questions for later or for another interview. Communications always work both ways. The interviewees are always, though per haps unobtrusively, studying the interviewers who study them. Historians might as well recognize h s fact and make the best of its advantages, rather than try to eliminate it for thc sake of an impossible (and perhaps undesirable) neutrality. The final result of the interview is the product of both the narrator and the researcher. When interuiews, as is often the case, are arranged for publication omit ting entirely the interviewers voice, a subtle distortion takes place: the text gives the answers without the questions, giving the impression that a gwen narrator r i l l always say the same thmgs, no matter what the circumstances in other words, the impression that a s p e h g person is as stable and repetitive as a written document. When thc researchers voice is cut out, the narrators voice is distorted. Oral testimony, in fact, is never the sarnc twice. This is a characteristic of all oral communication, but is especially true of relatively unstructured forms, such as autobiographical or historical statements given in an interview. Even the same inter viewer gets different vcrsions from the same nart-ator at different times. As thc: two subjects comc to know each other better, the narrators vigilance may be attenuated. Class subordination - trying to identify with what the narrator thinks is the interviewers interest - may bc replaced by more independence or by a better understanding of the purposes of the intervicw . Or a previous interview may have simply awakened memories which are then told in later meetings. The fact that interviews with the same person may hc continued indefinitely leads us to the question of the inherent incompleteness of oral sources. It is impossible to exhaust the entire memory of a single informant; the data extracted with cach interview are always the result of a selection produced by the mutual relationship. Historical research with oral sources therefore always has the
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unfinished nature of a work in progress, In order to go through all the possible oral sources for the Terni strikes of 1949 to 1953, one ought to interview in depth several thousand people: any sample would only be as reliable as the sampling methods used, and could never guarantee against leaving out qualit) narrators w-hose testimony alone might be worth ten statistically selected ones. The unfinishedness of oral sources affects all other sources. Given that no research (concerning a historical time for which living memories are available) is complete unless it has exhausted oral as we11 as written sources, and that oral sources are inexhaustible, the ideal goal of going through all possible sources becomes impossible. Historical work using oral sources is unfinished because of the nature of the sources; hstorical work excluding oral sources (where available) is incomplete by debition.

Who speaks in oral history?

Oral history is not where the worlung classes speak for themselves. The contrary statement, of course, would not be entirely unfounded: the recounting of a strike through the words and memories of workers rather than those of the police and the (often unfriendly) press obviously helps (though not automatically) to balance a &stortion implicit in those sources. Oral sources are a necessary (not a sufficient) condition for a history ofthe nonhegemonic classes; they are less ncccssary (though by no means useless) for the history of the ruling classes, who have had control over writing and leave behind a much more ahundant written record. Nevertheless, the control of historical discoursc remains firmly in the hands of the historian. It is the historian who selects the people who will be interviewed; who contributes to the shaping of the testimony by aslung the questions and reacting to the answers; and who gives thc tcstirnony- its final published shape and context (if only in terms of montage and transcription). Even accepting that the working class speaks through oral history, it is clear that the class does not speak in the abstract, but speaks to the historian, with the historian and, inasmuch as the material is published, through the historian. Indeed, things may also be the other way around. The historian may validate his or her discourse by ventriloquizingi t through the narrators testimony. So far from disappearing in the objectivity of the sources, the historian remains important at least as a partner in dialogue, often as a stagedirector of the interview, or as an organizer of the testimony. Instead of discovering sources, oral hstorians partly create them. Far from becoming mere mouthpieces for the working class, oral historians may he using other peoples words, but are still responsible for the overall discourse. Much more than written documents, which frequently carry the impersonal aura of the institutions by which they are issued even though, of course, they are composed by indi\<duals, of whom we often know little or nothing oral sources involve the entire account in their own subjectivity. Alongside the first person narra tive of the interviewee stands the first person of the historian, without whom there would be no interview. Both the informants and the historians discourse are in narrative form, which is much less frequently the case with archival documents. Informants are historians, after a fashion; and the lstorian is, in certain ways, a part of the source.
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Traditional writers of hstory present themselves usually in the role of what literary theory would describe as an omniscient narrator. They gwe a third-person account of events of which they were not a part, and w h c h thcy dominate entirely and from above (abovc the consciousness of the participants themselves). They appear to be impartial and detached, never entering the narrative except to give comments aside, after the manner of some nineteenth-century novelists. Oral history changes the writing of history much as the modern novel transformed the writing of literary fiction: thc most important change is that the narrator is now pulled into the narrative and becomes a party of the story. This is not just a grammatical shift from the third to the first pcrson, but a whole new narrative attitude. The narrator is now one of the characters, and the telling of the story is part of the story being told. This implicitly indicates a much deeper political and personal involvement than that of the external narrator. Writing radical oral history, then, is not a matter of ideology, of subjective sides-tahg, or of choosing one set of sources instead of another. It is, rather, inherent in the hstorians presence in the story, in the assumption of responsibility- which inscribes her or him in the aceuunt and reveals historiography as an autonomous act of narration. Political choices become less visible and vocal, but more basic. The myth that the historian as a subject might disappear in the objjcctive truth of working-class sources was part of a view of political militancy as the annihilation of all subjective roles into that of the full-time activist, and as absorption into an abstract worhng class. This resulted in an ironical similarity to the traditional attitude which saw historians as not subjectwely involved in the hstory which they were writing. Oral historians appcar to yield to other subjects of mscourse, but, in fact, the historian becomes less and less of a go-between from the worlang class to the rcader, and more and more of a protagonist. In the writing of history, as in literature, the act of focusing on the function o f the narrator causes this function to be fragmented. In a novel such as Joseph Conrads L u r d j i m , the character/narrator Marlow can recount only what hc himself has seen and heard; in order to tell the w-hole story, he is forced to take several other informants into his tale. The same thing happens to hstorians worlang with oral sources. On explicitly entering the story, historians must allow the sources to enter the tale with their autonomous discourse. Oral hstory has no unified subject; it is told from a multitude of points of view, and the impartiality traditionally claimed by historians is rcplaced by the partiality of the narrator. Partiality here stands for both unfinishedness and for taking sides: oral history can never be told without taking sides, since the sides exist inside the telling. ,4rid, no matter what their personal histories and beliefs map be, historians and sources are hardly ever on the same side. The confrontation of their different partialities - confrontation as conflict, and confrontation as search for unity is one of the things which rnakc oral history interesting.
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Notes
1

B. Placido in Lu Repubbl~cu,3 October 1978. One Italian exception is the Instituto Ernest0 De Martino, an independent radical research organization based in Milan, which has published sound archives on

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10 11

lung-playing records since the mid-l96& - without anyone in the cultural establishment noticing: see F. Coggiola, Lattiviti dclllstituo 1-nesto de Martino, n Itolia, Palernio: Flaccovio, 1975, pp. in D. Carpitella (ed.), Letnornusjcologin i 265-270. L.. Passerini, Sullutilit8 e il danno delle fonti orali pcr la storia. Introduction to Passerini (ed.), Storm UraIe. Vito quotidiana e cultma moleride &lie class; stibolrerne, lorino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1978, discusses thc relationship o f oral history and social history
On musical notation as reproduction of sprcch sounds, see G. Marini, Musira popohre e parlato popolare urhano, in Circolo GiaMi Bosio (ed.), I giorni cnnrati, Milano: Mazzotta, 1958, pp. 33-34. A. Lomax, Folk Song $des and Culture, Washington DC: American Association for the Advancement of Scirnccs, 1968, Publication no. 88, discusses electronic representation of vocal styles.
See W Labov, The logic of nun-standard English, in L. Kampf and P. Lauter (eds), Tbe Politics $Literature, New York: Random House, 1970, pp. 194-244, on the expressive qualities of non-standard speech. In this article, I usc these terms as defined and used by G . Geruiete, Figures I l l , Pans: S e d , 1972. O n genre distinctions in folk and oral narrative, see D. Bcn-Amos, Categories analy tiqurs et genres populdres, PoQtique, 1974, no. 19, pp. 268-293; and J . Vansina, Oral TradJrian, Haimondsworth: Penguin Books, [ 19611, 1973. For instance, G. Bordoni, Communist activist from Rome, talked about family and community mainly in dialect, hut shiftcd briefly to a more standardized form of Italian whenever he wanted to reaffirm his allegiance to the party. The shift shihowcd that, although he accepted the partys decisions, they remained other than his direct experi ence. His recurring idiom was Theres nothing you can do about it. See Circolo Gianni Bosio, I glomi cuntati, pp. 58-66. On fabula and plot see B. TomaBevslaj, Sjuietnoe pmtrocnic, in Ieariju literuruy %e&, MoscowLeningrad, 1928; Italian trans., La costruzione dellintreccio, in T. lodorov (ed.), Iforrnolisti russj, Torino: Einaudi, 1968, published as Tbkorie de la littthture, Paris: S e d , 1965. These stones are discussed in chapters 1 and 6 of A. Portelli, The Death ajluigi Trastulli, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. R. Jakobson and P. Rogatyrcv, Le folklore forme specitique de creation, in R. Jakobson, Quecrions de paitique, Paris: S e d , 1973, pp. 59-72.